If you have seen my other web page on the World Organization you will already know that I believe that Shri Sathya Sai Baba is a major Avatar living in the world today. He may also be the most spiritual and powerful Avatar ever to descend on earth.
His teachings are simple. His motto is universal - Love All, Serve All. His religious practices are primarily Hindu. However, he preaches the unity of all faiths, mainly - Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism. There is nothing in his message that any reasonable person could find fault with. I have been to his Ashram in India several times, but I have never been asked to donate a cent. The stay in Ashram by US standards, though austere, is dirt cheap. Even by Indian standards, the Ashram is cheap and the facilities are excellent. He has millions of devotees, some say over 25 million. This is not that hard to believe, several thousand come for His Darshan every day of the year. He counts among his devotees several prime ministers, presidents, supreme court justices, royalty, industrialists, billionaires, professors, scientists, doctors and also people from probably every country in world (maybe with the exception of closed places like North Korea). His organization is massive with many major donors and vast charitable and educational activities. He is credited with performing many miracles. His trademark miracle is the frequent production of vibhuti with a wave of His hands, seemingly out of air. He then distributes it to the people at darshan. At special occasions, he has been known to produce huge mounds of this vibhuti out of a fairly small vessel. (By the way, this magical vibhuti does taste a bit out of the world, at least to me and I have tried vibhuti from lots of places.) There are several places in the world where pictures of him in the houses of his devotees, are covered by vibhuti which appears magically out of thin air. I never did pay that much attention to stories of his miracles. The profound effect that His Darshan has on me (I can feel it in my forehead), is enough to convince me of his authenticity. At the time of darshan, he often calls on some of the devotees in the audience to meet him (in groups) for an in-person interview. He frequently presents these interviewees with trinkets like rings, necklaces, watches (again apparently created out of thin air). Sometimes he asks one of persons (usually a man) in the group for a private interview. At these he has been known to rub vibhuti or oil on one or more of the person's chakras (not to women though), usually the lower chakras, but also sometimes the heart chakra.
With all this fame, money and mass following, Sai Baba naturally has his critics and his enemies, basically those who are desperately trying to destroy His reputation and His following. The internet is literally full of websites which accuse him of the most horrendous of actions from fake miracles, fake spirituality, inconsistent and incorrect philosophy, to financial fraud, involvement in murders, sexual abuse and then the clincher - the accusation that is guaranteed to destroy any person - pedophilia. What better way for the Dark Forces to destroy an Avatar than to spread such stories about it.
Now as an Avatar, I am sure Sai Baba can take care of Himself and knows exactly how to handle all these people and stories. In fact the accusations have been around for well over a decade, but his fame and following has been growing steadily all the time. So the point of this web page is not to defend him. He does not need my defense - actually the job of meticulously addressing every accusation against him, has already been done by Joe Moreno at his site. The point of this page is to list the different type of detractors Sai Baba has and try to understand their motives. (I must confess I have some difficulty understanding all these people so if you have any thoughts on it, please email me).
Just one thing I do want to mention, about the pedophilia charge - the youngest known accuser is sixteen years old (there maybe another younger one at 15, but he is an anonymous accuser and so easily faked), most of them are in their late twenties or thirties - Europeans who may easily be twice the size of Sai Baba (he has always weighed 108 lbs). These are definitely NOT children. Out of a following of 20 million or more, they number less than 30.
The various types of detractors are:
Among the evangelist christians, the main Sai Baba critic is Tal Brooke. He used to be Sai Baba disciple before he converted to Christianity through the assistance of missionaries in India. He regards the New Age as a 'Satanic Conspiracy' and anyone associated with it as tools of the devil. He also promotes Creationism/Intelligent Design and other favorite fundamentalist Christian issues.
Another Christian with the largest Anti-Sai Baba site is Reinier van der Sandt. His site is advertised as the 'website of concerned former devotees'. However, I am not sure that Sandt was ever a devotee himself. This website tries not to be anti-Hindu or anti-New Age like Tal Brooke's organization. They prefer to make it appear that they maintain this site as a public service. The site has uncorroborated 'testimonies' of about twenty ex-devotees who claim to have been sexually abused (this out of a total of several million followers). The rest of the site is enormous with many articles, letters, claims of fraud etc, but does not contain anything very significant (the bit about 'murders' is just fanciful and silly. Those killed were actually victims of the trigger-happy Indian police). Apart from doing his best to discredit a non-Christian organization which may be gaining a world-wide following, I am not sure what his motive is. That he is just trying to save new victims from sexual abuse, merely out of the good of his heart, does not seem likely. Afterall, 20 or 30 accusers (most of them in their 30s) out of several million Sai Baba followers, is not that many. He would probably save more young boys from sexual abuse, by asking them to stay away from the Catholic church. If his motives were really that altruistic, there are many ways he could be helping young men looking for spiritual guidance - he just seems to be anxious to keep them away from non-Christian leaders like Sai Baba.
Other large anti-Sai Baba websites are mostly copies of this one (with maybe a couple of new pages added). Whether they are run by the same person (RVS) or not is not clear.
Most of the accusers themselves, either of sexual abuse or of some kind of fraud (no real miracle, only magic trick etc), don't seem mentally very stable to me. Doctors usually do not want to examine such people alone, because you never know what they will accuse the doctors of having done during the examination. They remind me of Cathy O'Brian who wrote a book claiming to have been a sex slave and having had sex with all the US presidents in recent years (including their wives). If Tanya Datta made a documentory on the US presidency, she probably would interview Cathy O'Brian first. The thing to realize is that Ms O'Brian can be quite convincing because she actually believes in her own story. Some of Sai Baba's accusers seem to be similarly deluded - but among several million devotees you would expect to find a few like that. If the target was not Sai Baba and there were not so many with vested interests in discrediting him, such people would usually be ignored.